[kaolinite]

It’s interesting to me how quickly I’ve soured on the concept of open banking, which on paper sounds fantastic and originally I was very much in favour of. And which I’ve used personally to make it easier to extract my own data for my own use.

However more often than not now I’m seeing it used for really invasive applications. Such as when I rented my most recent apartment and they asked to use open banking to verify our finances, which as far as I know would have given them access to every single transaction going back a decade or so. The agent was confused as to why I wouldn’t go ahead with it and ultimately let us opt out, but I do worry that at some point I won’t have much choice but to accept.

I’ve also seen credit scoring companies that suggest you’ll get a better credit score if you use open banking to hand over your transactions. I have no need to use that but I suspect others who are desperate to increase their chances of getting a mortgage, etc, won’t have much of a choice.

[phil-martin]

I feel the same. The convenience will likely outweigh the security concerns in the not too distant future.

What I would like is some middle step - that instead of allowing open access to accounts, I get to choose how the data is summarised and presented. e.g. just show total income and outgoings, fortnightly, over the last 6 months. Things like that.

Yes, I could export the transactions, do some Excel hand waving and make a report, then make a PDF and send it, then they would do data entry into their system summarising what they read. But automating that data sharing step would be fantastic.

I am in the process of applying for a home loan at the moment, and the amount of documentation is significant. If I were able to automate 80% of it in a fairly anonymised data way, that would be really useful.

[beachy]

> Such as when I rented my most recent apartment and they asked to use open banking to verify our finances

There was a Launch HN recently that did just this, but for people like Uber drivers wanting to borrow money to buy their own car. They handed over their Uber credentials, and the service scraped their Uber history to determine whether they were a good risk or not.

I'm not usually into slippery slope arguments but what your landlord asked of you is just that little bit worse than their service (worse as they have access to your bank account, not just your payroll data).

I think the moral of the story is that as a provider (Uber, a bank), you should be proactive about providing read-only access to data, removing the need for screen scraping and providing better security to your drivers/customers.